...or she was a brainwashed child assassin? Think 'Hanna' meets the 'Manchurian Candidate' with a dash of 'Leon' and some River Tam.

On the other hand, I've seen interviews with SMJ in which he says he thinks of his Nick Fury as the same one that fought in WWII and there's some mechanism--as yet unexplained--keeping him young. Assuming he's right, there may indeed be something else out there. (Note I have not yet seen TWS yet so I don't know yet how he's been kept alive all these years...though I can probably guess.)

Actually wasn't it Black Widow who told Cap that (besides Banner) a lot of people tried to replicate the super soldier serum? It'd make sense that the Soviets would be just as eager to get their hands on it as any super-power.

As for her accent...um, she's a master spy and expert infiltrator. She can have whatever accent she wants.

Well Winter Soldier confirmed the comics full name and birthdate for her (Natalia Alianovna Romanoff, November 22, 1984, a few days older than me).

From the movies we know she was a KGB agent of some form, with a specialised skillset which apparently consisteing of the cold blooded massacre of anyone the agency pointed her at, which at some point included a hospital, families, children etc

Barton was sent by SHIELD to kill her and for some reason, gave her a second chance, she was taken to SHIELD's American HQ and extensively retrained to be one of them, but essentially still the master assassin sent to eliminate anyone they thought threatened world peace.

So I'd say all we need to know is, she kills people for a living, and doesn't (to her own admission in TWS) really care who.

Claremont is writing, Jim Lee is drawing. It's literally a work of art. In 1941, in Mandripor, the Hand, a group of evil ninjas, try to kidnap/smuggle a 5 year old Russian Ballet prodigy, Natasha Romanov, across the world, to pervert into the worlds finest assassin, only to be stopped fast by "Patch" and his nimble sidekick Captain America.

Thereafter, for a couple years at least, that the Black Widow kept calling Wolverine: "Uncle Logan".

In 616 continuity, Nick Fury downed something called the Infinity Formula which keeps him youthful.

We know from Avengers that Black Widow is a known element within Russian circles. Her "captor" makes reference to, paraphrase, "...that the Black Widow is nothing more than just a pretty face". Indicating she has some reputation but to what extent is unknown. I'd wager that reputations was earned while she worked for a Russian Black Ops outfit. [..]

Click to expand...

There are at least two other references in The Avengers that point to her Russian spy background. The first is her saying "Bozhe moi" after she understands that the "big guy" she gets to go recruit is Banner.

The second is during her conversation with Banner. He sarcastically asks if the young girl who tricks him into the meeting is a SHIELD spy and if they start that young these days, to which Natasha simply replies "I did."

Or her personality could have been overlain/programmed into a hot 29 year olds body... Even if it was just the abilities (Think Joe-90) of a cold war era soviet super spy that was downloaded into her rather than spending 20 years teaching her how to do everything, and a little bit of the late 70s dribbled into her long term memory.

Nifty! I like the idea of Agent Carter serving as a bridge between the fall and spring portions of an AoS second season, sort of a midseason replacement. Maybe the AoS storyline could be designed to tie into AC somehow, with the team needing to research events that had happened in the past in order to solve the problem they're facing in the present, so that its cliffhanger could work as a setup for AC.

She doesn't have to have an affair with Howard, but what's going to be interesting is seeing how every one else around these two are loyal to Hydra, and how every mission peggy sets up is backhanded victory for evil.

What would be fantastic is that if every 5 to 10 episodes, Peggy figures it out, and then Zola has to brainwash her into forgetting, until she finally rationalizes that only Hydra can stop a third world war, and she might as well tuck in with the program or become comfortable living in an atomic wasteland.

Showing the process of going form saving America from four colour threats, to assassinating difficult world leaders in their sleep.